Here in Northern California, our spring has already begun. Manzanita
is in flower, and the almonds and wild plums are in full bloom.
Everything that's not concrete is green, greener than anything you can
imagine. Ireland green. It is the Time of Salads.

And no wild salad green is more important than miner's lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata.
I took a walk yesterday near Folsom, and within a mile I saw enough of
the plant to feed a small town. It is everywhere, so much so that no
one can see it. It's become wallpaper, an anonymous part of the green
world we're enjoying these days. I watched scores of people pass one of
the world's great salad greens without so much as a second glance.

I wonder if they just didn't recognize the plant in its natural
setting? After all, next to blackberries and wild fennel, miner's
lettuce is probably the most recognized wild edible in this part of the
country. Even dazzling urbanites seem to know it, possibly recalling
dim memories of summer camps gone by, or of a fancy Alice Waters salad
they might have enjoyed at Chez Panisse back in 1989 or something. In
gourmet circles, miner's lettuce has become commonplace, an
afterthought. It is the iceberg lettuce of wild foods.

Hank Shaw

Undeservedly so. Miner's lettuce is pleasingly crunchy,
mild-tasting, has large leaves, remains tender even when in flower, and
is so loaded with vitamins it will cure scurvy. The plant got its name
because the Gold Rush miners ate it to stave off the disease, which is
caused by a Vitamin C deficiency; they learned this trick from the
local Indians, no doubt.

According to a study in the Journal of the American Dietetic
Association, 100 grams of miner's lettuce—about the size of a decent
salad—contains a third of your daily requirement of Vitamin C, 22
percent of the Vitamin A, and 10 percent of the iron. Combine this with
stinging nettles and you have everything you need to revive your system from a winter's worth of heavy meats, dried grains, and roots.

All of these qualities impressed early explorers so much they saved the seeds of Claytonia perfoliata and brought them back to Europe to grow, first as a curiosity, then as a food plant.

Many sources say this happened in 1749, but I have never found any
reference to any original source of this date, which I think is a
transposition of the real date the plant reached Europe. According to Hortus Kewensis,
an 1811 catalog of everything growing in England's famous Kew
Gardens, the great Scots naturalist Archibald Menzies discovered
miner's lettuce on the West Coast of America in 1794, not 1749, and he brought seeds back to Kew, where it flourished.

I took a look at Menzies' journal of the expedition—he was with
George Vancouver on Vancouver's famous round-the-world voyage—and it
appears that Menzies actually found the plant along Puget Sound, in
current-day Washington, on May 7, 1792:

A little before won the Fog dispersd... we walkd along shore... In
this walk I found growing in the Crevices of a small rock about midway
between the two points a new Species of Claytonia [a small flowering
herb] & as I met with it no where else in my journeys, it must be
considerd as a rare plant in this country. I namd it Claytonia furcata & took a rough sketch of it which may be seen in my collections of Drawings.

It is not exactly clear whether this is miner's lettuce or not, but
this is Menzies's only mention of claytonia in the journals he kept on
the voyage, and there are any number of accounts published before 1820
that mark this as the plant's European provenance.

Miner's lettuce was so important as a source of Vitamin C that the
British planted it in Cuba and, later, in Australia. An early 19th-century article I found notes that miner's lettuce was already
well-established in Cuba by 1811, and that it was "spontaneously
growing" in the Botanical Gardens of Paris. By mid-century it was being
sold by seedsmen as a salad green and potherb—and was rapidly
becoming a weed in England.

This is a rare thing. Nearly all our edible household weeds are of
European origin: dandelion, plantain, most thistles, chickweed,
purslane, mallow, cat's ear, garlic mustard, shepherd's purse. For our
very own miner's lettuce to be brought back to Europe, and for it to
become a widespread edible weed, is almost unprecedented.

What's more, miner's lettuce is one of the very few foods native to
North America that we commonly eat. Think about it: How much of the
food in your pantry is native to this place? Wild rice, turkey,
cranberries, jerusalem artichokes for sure. Chiles and some squash and
beans can qualify, but they are more Central American. Let's face it,
when it comes to the salad course, miner's lettuce is the king of our
indigenous cuisine.

Why it hasn't become part of our standard "salad mix" is beyond me.
It's ridiculously easy to grow, loves moist shade, and you can buy miner's lettuce seeds pretty
much anywhere. I am growing some this spring, and, like my wild
arugula, will be happy to have this little plant colonize my yard.

Hank Shaw

So far as eating miner's lettuce is concerned, there is really no
reason to stray beyond the salad. This is how most of us enjoy it
today, and it's how the Native Americans ate the plant - although I
think I'll skip the trick performed by a few tribes that lived around
Auburn, California: They would apparently strew miner's lettuce leaves
along the highways of a particular kind of ant, which would then
excrete something acidic (formic acid, maybe?) on the leaves, flavoring
them like vinegar. Weird, eh? I think I'll stick to vinaigrette.

Normally I mix greens to create certain flavors and textures (I wrote about making a proper salad a
while back), but sometimes I prefer to eat miner's lettuce solo. You
really get to know a green when you do this, and you don't want to
dress such a salad too heavily; just a light coating is all.

I made a light mustard vinaigrette for the dressing, and added some
fresh ground black pepper and a little flake salt for texture and
crunch. The effect is tart, smooth, a little crunchy, and very "green"
tasting. Miner's lettuce is also known as winter purslane (they're both
in the portulaca family) and if you have ever eaten regular summer
purslane, you can appreciate the succulent texture of this plant.

Hank Shaw

For those of you who live anywhere from British Columbia east to the
Great Plains, you can find miner's lettuce, and its various claytonia
cousins, in shady, moist spots in spring. According to the USDA,
miner's lettuce has naturalized in a few places east of the Plains,
notably Ohio, Georgia, and New Hampshire. Pick from February to May, but
you will need to find deeper, cooler places the later you go.

The best leaves grow under trees. Miner's lettuce is perfectly fine
when in flower—unlike most spring greens—but pick before the flower
stalk gets too long. Once picked, miner's lettuce leaves will last in a
plastic bag in the fridge for three to five days without too much loss of
quality. Keep a damp paper towel in the bag to keep everything nice and
fresh.

Most Popular

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The president has sided with Luther Strange in the primary matchup, a candidate who has lagged behind his challenger Roy Moore in polling.

Alabama Republicans head to the polls on Tuesday in a special election primary. The race pits former state attorney general Luther Strange against former judge Roy Moore in a fight for the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Polls close at 8 p.m. EST.

Strange has President Trump’s endorsement and has benefited from millions of dollars in spending from political groups aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Even so, Strange, who was temporarily appointed to the Senate seat in February by then-Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, has trailed in the polls, lagging behind his challenger. Moore is a conservative firebrand who was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after refusing to move a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building.